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Near-Demise of Boise’s Micron Technology - Part of a Global Pattern?
Is this just temporary, or is it the future of work in America?
By Jill Kuraitis, 7-08-09
The near-demise of Micron Technology’s chip fabrication plant and the more than halving of its workforce is yet another way Boise is changing, and it may fit into a national trend of fewer big employers and more small-to-medium businesses, and a sea-change in the nature and values of work.
According to some business analysts, these changes probably mean less job security and more young people and women in charge. From Time Magazine:
Ten years ago, Facebook didn’t exist. Ten years before that, we didn’t have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25‑year high, work will eventually return. But it won’t look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values — and women will increasingly be at the controls.
Is this just a temporary trend, or is it the future of work in America? Will reducing operations budgets and payroll be the only tactic that will restore employment? What went wrong?
Authors of “Corporate Agility,” Charles E. Grantham, Dr. James Ware and Cory Williamson wrote,
“Although the global economy had undergone a series of rapid, model-shattering changes, most businesses had been unable, or unwilling, to adapt their traditional management styles to the new conditions.
Prisoners of their outdated business practices and their assumptions about how work gets done, most organizations found themselves losing ground to competitors who had not even been on the map a decade before. They became victims, rather than beneficiaries, of advances in information technology. And at a time when the attraction and retention of qualified, engaged employees had become an even more critical factor in a business’s success or failure, they found themselves out of touch with a workforce that had undergone a dizzying transformation in attitudes, abilities, and ambitions.”
The merging of American and global economies, surprising new technologies, different employee expectations and unaffordable health care costs – the average American company spends $14K a year on those benefits - are among the most cited reasons for the changes in work and employment the country is experiencing, according to these business theorists.
More reading:
Business Week: Which Way to the Future?
Acrobat.com: Collaborative Methods Research
HorseCowPig: Futzing as the Future of Work
Price Waterhouse: Managing Tomorrow’s People: the Future of Work to 2020
Jill,
Great article and very acute thinking. The trend is not just national. It is global and picking up speed. We have a significant number of companies across Idaho operating in the virtual world and getting work done on a global basis. The nature of work has been changing for some time. It is common here in the "valley" to hear younger technos talking about their current "projects". Most of them will tell you that they are NOT looking for a standard 8 to 5, five days aweek JOB. They are looking for work but generally it is days or weeks of pretty intense long hours and something gets done and they are off to the next thing. None of them are looking for the "gold watch treatment". What you wrote about is here and will only grow. Companies will be smaller (there is no the next Micron or HP), their employment levels and space footprint will be much small BUT the will generate higher levels of revenues (and ultimately taxes). It is unlikely that any of the companies they build will ever grow to be OLD by today's standards. The entrepreneurial economy is replacing the industrial economy and the pace of that replacement is accelerating. Look at the companies that now make up the Dow Jones and S&P;500. Fewer and fewer are from the industrial economy. Anyway, thanks for the thought provoking piece.